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Release: June 7, 2011

$6.99

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Product Description Over the course of an eventful year, a long-married couple brightens the lives of their family and friends through a winning combination of love, wisdom and the gift of hope in this critically acclaimed slice of life from master filmmaker Mike Leigh. Amazon.com Director Mike Leigh's gift for finding rich drama and humor in ordinary human lives remains as strong as ever in Another Year. Plot is almost nonexistent: Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happy and settled couple, both support and try to fend off the neediness of their less fortunate friends--particularly Mary (Lesley Manville), whose fantasies of romance with Tom and Gerri's son Joe (Oliver Maltman) come crashing down when Joe brings home his new girlfriend Katie (Karina Fernandez). Leigh's ability to draw astoundingly fully realized performances from his superb casts can turn a simple bit of anxious flirting into nerve-wracking comedy, or make the audience feel the cruel sting of a sudden disappointment. Manville (who's appeared in previous Leigh movies, as has most of the cast) turns in a remarkably alive performance, making Mary's yearning and fears almost uncomfortably vivid--but everyone in the cast is thoroughly natural, with the ever-dependable Broadbent (familiar from Moulin Rouge and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) and Sheen anchoring the film with a quiet, confident affection. Another Year is a gentle addition to Leigh's oeuvre; it doesn't have the head-to-head conflict of Secrets and Lies or the musical fervor of Topsy-Turvy. This movie's emotions are more rueful and reflective, pondering the nature of contentment. Much as Happy-Go-Lucky questioned the essence of cheerfulness, Another Year asks, What makes one person able to find love, while another flounders? Not a common topic for a movie, but Mike Leigh is not a common filmmaker. --Bret Fetzer

Release: February 25, 2025

$7.99

Description

In a return to the contemporary world, Hard Truths reunites legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh with Marianne Jean-Baptiste for the first time since Secrets and Lies to deliver a compassionate study of family and the thorny ties that bind us.

Release: May 28, 2013

$7.99

Description

This moving film from Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy) is an intimate, invigorating, and amusing portrait of a working-class family in a suburb just north of London—an irrepressible mum and dad (Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent) and their night-and-day twins, a bookish good girl and a sneering layabout (Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks). In it, Leigh and his typically brilliant cast create, with extra­ordinary sensitivity and craft, a vivid, lived-in story of ordinary existence, in which even modest dreams (such as the father’s desire to open a food truck) carry enormous weight. Perched on the line between humor and melancholy, LIFE IS SWEET is captivating, and it was Leigh’s first international sensation.

Release: August 15, 2017

$7.99

Description

A slow-burning depiction of economic degradation in Thatcher's England, Mike Leigh's 'Meantime' was the culmination of the writer-director's pioneering work in television and became his breakthrough theatrical release. Unemployment is rampant in London's working-class East End, where a middle-aged couple and their two sons languish in a claustrophobic public housing flat. As the brothers (Phil Daniels and Tim Roth) grow increasingly disaffected, Leigh punctuates the grinding boredom of their daily existence with tense encounters, including with a priggish aunt (Marion Bailey) who has managed to become middle-class and a blithering skinhead on the verge of psychosis (a scene-stealing Gary Oldman, in his first major role). Informed by Leigh s now trademark improvisational process and propelled by the lurching rhythms of its Beckett-like dialogue, Meantime is an unrelenting, often blisteringly funny look at life on the dole. DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES - New, restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by cinematographer Roger Pratt and director Mike Leigh, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack - New conversation between Leigh and musician Jarvis Cocker - New conversation between actor Marion Bailey and critic Amy Raphael - More! - PLUS: An essay by film scholar Sean O'Sullivan

Release: July 12, 2011

$7.99

Description

The brilliant and controversial Naked, from director Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy), stars David Thewlis (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as Johnny, a charming and eloquent but relentlessly vicious drifter. Rejecting anyone who might care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself through a nocturnal odyssey around London, colliding with a succession of other desperate and dispossessed people, and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge (Before the Rain) and Lesley Sharp (The Full Monty), Leigh’s picture of England’s underbelly is an amalgam of black comedy and doomsday prophecy that took the best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes International Film Festival.

Release: March 30, 2021

$7.99

Description

Writer-director Mike Leigh reached new levels of expressive power and intricacy in his ongoing contemplation of unembellished humanity with this resonant exploration of the deceptions, small and large, that shape our relationships to those we love. When Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a Black optometrist who was adopted as a child, begins the search for her birth mother, she doesn’t expect that it will lead her to Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award), a desperately lonely white factory worker whose tentative embrace of her long-lost daughter sends shock waves through the rest of her already fragile family. Born from a painstaking process of rehearsal and improvisation with a powerhouse ensemble cast, Secrets & Lies is a Palme d’Or–winning tour de force of sustained tension and catharsis that lays bare the emotional fault lines running beneath the surface of everyday lives. DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Mike Leigh and director of photography Dick Pope, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack New conversation with Leigh and composer Gary Yershon New interview with actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste Audio interview with Leigh from 1996 conducted by film critic Michel Ciment Trailer English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Release: March 29, 2011

$6.99

Description

The world of Gilbert and Sullivan comes to vivid life in this extraordinary dramatization of the staging of their legendary 1885 comic opera THE MIKADO from Mike Leigh (NAKED, SECRETS AND LIES). Jim Broadbent (MOULIN ROUGE, IRIS) and Allan Corduner (YENTL, VERA DRAKE) brilliantly inhabit the roles of the world famous Victorian librettist and composer, respectively, who, along with their troupe of temperamental actors, must battle personal and professional demons while mounting this major production. A lushly produced epic about the harsh realities of creative expression, featuring bravura performances and Oscar-winning costume design and makeup, TOPSY-TURVY is an unexpected period delight from one of contemporary cinemas great artists.